In a world of “facts,” this study might be “correct.” Yet, this is outrageous on two levels. First, calories that get me drunk are not empty calories. Soda offers nothing that can’t be achieved in other ways. Need caffeine, drink a cup of coffee. Need something sweet, there are a million options. People drink alcohol for specific reasons that cannot be replicated in a legal way. Humans throughout history have found drugs to alter their minds. In the United States we have chosen to make most of them illegal. Alcohol is an exception and so looking at it through the same lens we do as other food choices provides a limited perspective.

Second, the study is unpatriotic. Why do I drink? Because I am a good American. In a country where we have Supreme Court justices trying fit a brief 225 year old document understandable only in the context of the late 18th century around the contours of modern society in ways that often defy logic, we might as well examine what early Americans actually did if we want to emulate the Founders. What did they do? Drink.

The definitive book on this is W.J. Rorabaugh’s The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, the first chapter gives a solid overview of the topic and is where most of the following material originates. In short, before the Revolution, Americans drank approximately 3.7 gallons per person per year of hard alcohol alone (not counting beer, wine, and cider–by the far the predominant non-distilled beverage). While that dipped when rum supplies became scarce after 1776, it exploded to reach nearly 5 gallons by the 1820s, by this time mostly domestically produced whiskey. Between 1800 and 1830, the average American drank 15 gallons of hard cider, at least in the North. This was certainly gendered. According to the American Temperance Society (a fifth column of un-American activities if there ever was one), in the late 1820s, the nation’s 9 million women and children drank a total of 12 million gallons of distilled spirits per year; the nation’s 3 million men drank 60 million gallons. I’m not sure if or how those numbers included slaves, but like women, they drank less than white men. Both women and slaves faced social norms against excessive drinking; moreover, they were not accepted into the public and social drinking life of the early 19th century tavern. But both drank when and where they could. Children routinely drank in taverns by the age of 14. Drinking was especially popular within the American working class. In 1829, the Secretary of War estimated that 3/4 of the nation’s laborers drank at least 4 ounces of distilled spirits every day.

Ministers who considered themselves temperate drank. One, a supporter of temperance, drank 4 glasses of hard alcohol on Sunday to help him through his arduous workday. The Methodist church allowed at least one southern planter to be a member if he was temperate enough to hold his daily consumption of alcohol to one quart of peach brandy. On one horse carriage trip across Virginia, the team stopped 10 times over the 17 hour, 66 mile day. The passengers drank one drink at each stop, leading one foreign observer to write “the American stage coach stops every five miles to water horses, and brandy the gentlemen!” New York Governor George Clinton once hosted a dinner for the French ambassador. 120 guests at this party polished off 135 bottles of Madeira, 36 bottles of port, 60 bottles of English beer, and 30 large cups of rum punch.

George Washington was a whiskey distiller. John Adams drank a tankard of hard cider at breakfast every morning. Thomas Jefferson hosted the first presidential cocktail party and was one of the first Americans to import large quantities of French wine. Dolley Madison openly poured herself a hot toddy while meeting with a temperance reformer.

I could go on.

So hoist one this evening for George Washington, for the person working on the docks of New York in 1801, for the Pennsylvania corn farmer turning his product into whiskey, and for the slave woman sneaking some alcohol behind her master’s back. And if this means hoisting one for each of these people, well, that just makes you more of a patriot. If you’re going to say that alcohol is empty calories, you might as well say the Declaration of Independence is empty rhetoric. After all, it’s not like Thomas Jefferson was sober while writing the thing.

Certainly elephants can detect the fermenting fruit of the marula tree from 10kms and will coming running for it. The Bohemian waxwing has a taste for rowan berries that have begun to ferment. The birds are often found in heaps, dead on the ground, having fallen off their perch. Postmortem examinations show they were drunk when they died and that they had acute alcoholic liver disease.

The Cosmos is just one large saloon bar with nice decor, but questionable clientele. Cheers!

The medieval English and German peasant drank upwards of 3 liters of ale a day. Most of it was what we might call “small beer” (although not hopped) because it did not have a high alcohol content. Dinner and parties would have higher content ale. Wine was consumed to that amount in France and Italy.

Some have suggested that the Muslim advances in distillation and filtration of water were to see to the need for clean water, since the drinking of harder spirits was out of the question.

It is true that the water was not safe. I don’t know that it was the REASON the populace at large drank, but scholars of the time period understood (without knowing why) that consuming alcohol was safer than consuming, say, well water, especially in a city.

If I were to find myself back in the 18th century, I wouldn’t drink any water I hadn’t seen come from a clean mountain spring myself without boiling the everliving fuck out of it first. My alcohol consumption would go through the roof.

(What’s more likely, of course, is that I’d die in short order, being a weak-ass spindly guy with no applicable skills to the time period beyond being able to read and write.)

The popular image is of Johnny Appleseed spreading apple seeds randomly, everywhere he went. In fact, he planted nurseries rather than orchards, built fences around them to protect them from livestock, left the nurseries in the care of a neighbor who sold trees on shares, and returned every year or two to tend the nursery. Although apples grown from seed are rarely sweet or tasty, apple orchards with sour apples were popular among the settlers because apples were mainly used for producing hard cider and apple jack. In some periods of the settlement of the Midwest, settlers were required by law to plant orchards of apples and pears in order to uphold the right to the claimed land. For these reasons, Johnny Appleseed planted orchards made for popular real estate on the frontier.[6] His first nursery was planted on the bank of Brokenstraw Creek, South of Warren, Pennsylvania. Next, he seems to have moved to Venango County along the shore of French Creek,[7] but many of these nurseries were located in the Mohican area of north-central Ohio. This area included the towns of Mansfield, Lucas, Perrysville, and Loudonville.[8]
Subsistence lifestyle

According to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, towards the end of his career, he was present when an itinerant missionary was exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield, Ohio. The sermon was long and quite severe on the topic of extravagance, because the pioneers were starting to buy such indulgences as calico and store-bought tea. “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher repeatedly asked until Johnny Appleseed, his endurance worn out, walked up to the preacher, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a podium, and said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!” The flummoxed sermonizer dismissed the congregation.[9]

I dunno about this book, but I learned in grade school that the Pilgrims, those abstemious Puritans, mostly drank beer because the water was full of microorganisms. (Fun fact: a lot of Louis Pasteur’s early work dealt with the effects of microorganisms on the brewing process; beer gone bad during brewing was a common enough problem before the process of sterilization was fully understood that many laws were passed against selling bad beer, and it’s still an occasional problem for homebrewers.)

Both Bob Geldof and Johnny Rotten, in their autobiographies, talk about having been fed Guinness as infants to “strengthen” them; I believe Rotten says something about a hot poker being put in the beer first “to drive off the alcohol”, but if you know that the myth about using booze in cooking quickly and completely removing the ethanol is just that, then those were in fact a couple of shitfaced Irish babies. Which explains rather a lot, actually.

My understanding is that the amount of cocaine in early Coca-Cola is moderately exaggerated. Coca-Cola contained (and contains?) ingredients from coca leaves, but I don’t think they processed it in such a way as to contain significant amounts of proper cocaine.

But it’s certainly true that the history of narcotics is… kind of weird.

Visiting Denver. So far I have celebrated Centennial State exceptionalism with some Mercenary Double IPA, Avery IPA and 90 Shilling Ale. All of which I have enjoyed patriotically. We are headed to Boulder today and hope to hit a brewery and bask in the mountainous splendor. Any suggestions?

In terms of going completely against the explicit instructions of its founder, Christian Temperance is right up there with Muslim suicide bombing. I don’t even want to think what kind of contortions you need to go through to take a faith where drinking wine is at the core of your relationship with God – where it actually symbolises the love of God for man and his willingness to sacrifice for humanity – and turn it into an anti-alcohol cult.

C.S. Lewis was bitterly against Christian Temperence, he thought it was heretical. In Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote that if Christians wanted a religion that was against drinking they should become Muslim.*

*Although Indonesian Muslims and to a lesser extent Iranian Muslims seem to have clever workarounds for this.

Well, 19th century evangelical Americans were nothing if not idiosyncratic when it came to religion. Welch’s Grape Juice was originally an attempt to replicate Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine – since the Lord wouldn’t want His people to be drunkards, surely He created non-alcololic wine in that miracle. Why not try to do the same thing in the USA? So non-fermented grape juice was born – for sacramental purposes.

An old doc that used to do contract work in Saudi Arabia told stories of ordering large quantities of Welch’s grape juice and turning that miracle beverage back into wine. Apparently his Saudi hosts were unimpressed.

If you accept your messiah dying, being dead for three days in a pretty warm climate without refrigeration, and coming out of the tomb without a healthy appetite for blood and/or brains, then the rest is pretty damn easy.

Depends on your theology.
1) For catholics, the wine is no longer wine. It is blood that has all the visible and scientific qualities of wine but the substance of the stuff is blood.
2) For calvinists, the stuff is wine, and Christ is present in spirit.
3) For Lutherans, Anglicans and, I think, many Episcopalians, the stuff is blood and wine simultaneously. At least Lutherans have the “no questions” policy: It is blood, but a man cannot comprehend how and should not make any inquiries into the topic.

Much of the production of alcohol up until the Civil War was the result of creative use of agriculture surplus. America was already producing far more food than it could consume, and modern methods of storage and preservation didn’t exist.

There was some “alternative to water” thinking here (drinking water all the time is boring even if you think the water is safe), but there was also a lot of “wtf are we going to do with all this extra corn?”

let’s be blunt, if you lived before the mid-20th century, you’d spend as much time as possible drunk. hell, if the water didn’t kill you, something else would, quickly (accident) or slowly (infection). either way, it wouldn’t be painless. if you were lucky enough to survive those, a “dr’s” ministrations would likely do you in. even the wealthy spent much of their time potted, though they stood a better chance of dying peacefully in their bed, then did the working/slave classes.

A decent and accurate summary of early American drinking habits, but leaving out one important point: people drank that much because they had fuck-all else to do. Never mind no movies, TV, radio, internet, etc. Books were relatively scarce and expensive; newspapers could be good, but could also be as inflammatory, inaccurate, and plain badly-written as to make your average internet comment section look classy, witty and well-sourced; folk music, much beloved of NPR and countless baby boomers, was in reality on the average what you might get if you took the worst player on each instrument in an average high school band or orchestra, killed off a random third of them (with diseases like “milk fever” or “the ague” which don’t seem to exist any more), and threw them together and asked them (demanded! drunkenly!) to play the popular songs of the day without direction, practice, or sheet music. There were always dirty jokes, and a fellow could be pretty popular if he knew enough; it’s not much of a stretch to say that Abraham Lincoln was the first stand-up comic to be elected president.

And, of course, since food preservation techniques were literally primitive (see my comment about Pasteur above), you have the perfect setting to create a drug by a form of controlled spoiling. (You make hard cider by taking freshly-squeezed apple juice and… leaving it alone.) Drink enough, and you’d forget that the only other form of entertainment open to you, depending on your choice of partners and particular acts, would likely result in another damn mouth to feed, unless you coughed in its face extra hard the next time you had the milk fever.

So, yeah, those noble, brave, shitfaced pioneers. I’d take one in their memory, but sadly, I’ve given it up. But I’ve got an XBox, so fuck ‘em.

[…] When discussing food and beverage regulation as a matter of public health, a community activist must advocate for a policy that will not only “work” if it were implemented, but also it must include certain politically motivated criteria that will ensure its local passage. This is why soda, or sugared beverages in general, exists as the perfect political and policy solution for governments looking to promote individual healthy choices. Soda is uniquely situated for this role due to its ubiquity, its existence as a refined-sugar delivery device (to borrow a phrase from successful campaign against cigarettes), its incredibly low price (name another product with price stability as constant as a 12 ounce can of soda), and most importantly the devastating effect on one’s health that consuming that these drinks inherently produce. Few other foods fit the description of providing absolutely no nutritional benefit at such a high percentage for daily allotment of calories. With our nation’s unbelievably rates of diabetes, obesity, and dental problems all linked to the proliferation of sugary drinks, there is an obvious need to provide an effective policy solution that is framed around the elimination or discouragement of this useless part of the American diet. […]